The Last NIMBY in a YIMBY Town

Andrew Berman’s crusade to preserve the West Village has put him at odds with just about everyone. Illustration: Emma Erickson; Photo NYC Parks Illustration: Emma Erickson; Photo NYC Parks The Tony Dapolito Recreation Center is a 118-year-old red brick colossus, angling at a still relatively overlooked corner of the West Village where Clarkson and Varick streets converge on Seventh Avenue. Designed by the firm of James Renwick Jr., the architect behind the Smithsonian Institution Building and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and built at a time when social reformers pushed for public bathhouses so tenement dwellers could have a place to wash, the building features the same tile arch system as Grand Central and has been the backdrop for films like Raging Bull and Kids. A Keith Haring mural runs along a wall against its outdoor pool. Converted to a neighborhood recreation center in the 1910s, it is one of the last remaining public bathhouse structures in New York and was landmarked by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2010. “There’s a lot of connected history here, that’s why the city landmarked this,” said Andrew Berman on a Tuesday in late August as he peered through the fence and scaffolding that now surrounds the rec center. It has been closed since 2020, when workers who were renovating the building determined that it was structurally unsound and needed to be demolished entirely. “And now they want to knock it down,” he said, un-suturing from the neighborhood “history, a sense of place, a sense of continuity and connection to what came before.” For a quarter-century, Berman has been the executive director of Village Preservation, a group once known as the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation that changed its name in 2019 to reflect the fact that its ambitions were no longer limited to the 100 blocks or so of Greenwich Village. When Berman began, and for many years after, he was cast in New York’s operatic civic drama as a hero, the David battling the Goliath of big real-estate developers and a City Hall seemingly determined to alter the culture and streetscape of old New York. In the mid-2000s, as the city was in a post-9/11, pre-market-crash boom, the local internet was awash in blogs and websites like Forgotten New York, Vanishing New York, Lost City, and Brownstoner that chronicled the city’s changing face as new glass condos and office towers plunged into the city’s schist and Mayor Mike Bloomberg bragged about New York becoming a luxury product. Andrew Berman stood athwart all this, yelling “Stop.” Seemingly every week he could be found in front of some 19th-century downtown building, holding a press conference to warn of another imminent loss to the city’s history and to inveigh against another rapacious developer and indifferent administration downtown. In 2006, this magazine named Berman one of the most influential figures in real estate (alongside Louise Sunshine, Larry Silverstein, and Donald Trump) for his work in battling NYU’s expansion plans, and seven years later, Vanity Fair put him in its Hall of Fame “because he intrinsically understands that the Village, one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world, is blessed with ‘an incredible human scale, a low scale, with lots of sky and light — not words you use to describe all parts of New York City.’ Because Berman is savvy and pugnacious enough to recognize that there is no respite for the preservationist, ever, from those who would make the Village ‘bigger, glassier, newer.’’’ In the years since, Berman has been fighting much the same fight, pushing to cap building heights in one part of the Village at 12 stories, extending the Greenwich Village Historic District (which prevents not just new building, but even renovations on existing buildings), and fighting to prevent the rezoning of Soho and Noho, which the city said was needed both because it would add nearly 1,000 new affordable housing units but also because it would be the first time that a white and wealthier neighborhood would be required to add affordable housing. Berman opposed it because it would lead to out-of-scale development and would, he claimed, make the neighborhood more expensive, not less. But as Berman has been doing what Berman does, the city has changed around him. The vanishing New York chronicled in the blogs of the mid-aughts has mostly vanished, NYU has colonized large swaths of downtown, and a populace struggling to afford the crushing price of housing has arisen in its wake. YIMBYism has gone from a fringe concern to an organizing principle for young people priced out of cities. “Abundance” has entered the popular discourse, and with it questions of who exactly is to blame for why it has become so difficult to build, especially in places like New York. And the answer for many of these adherents is Andrew Berman. “He is one of the biggest NIMBYs in lower Manhattan and one of the main impediments to progress on housing policy,” said Ryder Kessler, the co-founder of Abundance New York, which advocates for building not just more housing but more subway lines, solar panels, and climate-resilient infrastructure. “He is using the same playbook we have seen from Jane Jacobs pushing back against Robert Moses, but instead of working-class communities coming together to say ‘no’ to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, it is wealthy homeowners saying ‘no’ to affordable housing for seniors or mixed-income housing where a parking lot currently is or changes that are going to be good for increasing affordable housing and sustainability.” (In response to criticisms, Berman says, “We’re pragmatic but principled. That’s the way we approach things. Some things where we’ve not gotten 100 percent, or 50 percent, but that half a loaf is better than none, and we try to stick to our principles while getting the best results that we think are possible.”) In the case of something like the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center, Berman points out that the city has already placed it within a historic district; tearing it down would create a precedent that previous landmark designations can be discarded when they become inconvenient. The city has said not just that the recreation center is structurally unsound but also soon to be unnecessary; across the street, the ground is about to be broken for Hudson Mosaic, a 35-story, nearly 280-unit building that will be 100 percent affordable housing and feature a new recreation center with a regulation-size pool and state-of-the-art facilities that will be operated by the Parks Department. Berman has argued that the development is out of context and doubted the claims of affordable housing promised by the developer. But to Berman’s increasingly vocal opponents, this dispute proves the point: that he isn’t saving the city from greedy real-estate developers, but instead carrying water for wealthy property owners in some of the most expensive precincts on Earth who have a vested interested in keeping their jewel box of a neighborhood as it is without any pesky new affordable-housing units. “Some amount of historic preservation is good for cities, but certainly New York City preserves much too much,” said David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on New York’s zoning regulations. Nearly a quarter of the buildings in Manhattan are under some landmark protections, and in some neighborhoods, like the Upper West Side and Berman’s Village, more than 70 percent of the area is under landmark protections. “If you want to know what life was like in 1750 or in 1900, it’s not like preserving the West Village will tell you that much,” said Schleicher. “Landmarking just preserves pretty things. And it’s not like preserving the buildings keeps neighborhoods as they were. If that were the case the West Village would be full of artists and folk singers. But Bob Dylan couldn’t afford to buy a house there until after he won a Nobel Prize.” In fact, Dylan paid $60 per month for the apartment on West 4th Street that he rented when he first moved to the city in 1961, or nearly $670 adjusted for inflation; the building housing that unit recently listed for $8.25 million, and the cheapest one-bedroom apartment goes for $4,800 per month. Berman’s project has been remarkably successful over the last quarter-century. By the start of 2002, when Berman started at Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, there were only 86 historic districts in the city; 12 years later, there were 131. With so many of the buildings downtown with any kind of historic architectural significance already under landmark protections, Berman has shifted his focus to preserving properties with some kind of social importance. He has successfully fought for the landmarking of the Stonewall Inn, for example, as well as the legendary Pyramid Club in the East Village, and his group is working to landmark the homes of the poet and publisher Steve Cannon and sites downtown connected to Anaïs Nin, Audre Lorde, Patti Smith, Martha Graham, and others. These kinds of sites, he told me, are “an important part of what makes New York interesting and wonderful. I also think that we learn from our history, and I think that if there’s anything that we’ve seen in the last couple of years, it’s that if we don’t understand our history, we make terrible mistakes. We don’t understand how we got to where we are today. We don’t understand what it took to get there. A lot of rights that we take for granted, people had to fight very hard for. They were not always a given. So I think having an understanding and a respect for history is an incredibly important element of a healthy present and future.” To those who worry that all of this landmarking is curbing the city’s ability to build new housing, and thus driving up prices, this latest effort by Berman isn’t so much about preserving history as prohibiting new development. Properties without architectural value don’t need to be preserved, they say, especially not when there is no effort to preserve the building’s use. The Pyramid Club, a site famous for its drag performances in the 1980s and ’90s, permanently shuttered in 2022, and the site currently houses a café and rock club. If you want honor sites of sociocultural importance, says Schleicher, “just put up a fucking plaque. This is New York City. It’s not like it’s Paris or some European capital. It’s truer to the spirit of New York to tear down and rebuild instead of putting the city behind glass.” Even among his fellow preservationists, Berman has developed a reputation as a hard-liner. Hudson Mosaic is not even within the Greenwich Village historic district, but Berman still opposes it, and even some preservationists point out that allowing taller buildings at sites outside of historic districts would allow the city to both preserve some of its landmarked properties and increase the housing supply. It doesn’t help that as much as Berman made his reputation protesting Bloomberg-era luxury development, that administration turned out to be more sympathetic to Berman’s project than subsequent ones. Bloomberg added or extended more than 40 historic districts and passed more than 80 neighborhood downzonings, while Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams were much more accommodating to real-estate interests. During his campaign, Zohran Mamdani spoke of how city officials had betrayed New Yorkers by not preserving the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center as promised — “This question is about a commitment that had been made that has since been walked back,” he told a group of downtown Democratic clubs weeks before the election, promising to “actually allocate the money that was promised and follow through on this commitment” — but since the election, Mamdani has let the demolition go forward and has, in keeping with the times, been one of the most pro-YIMBY mayors in generations. According to Jeremy Edwards, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, the city’s proposal “would create a new accessible outdoor aquatics complex with a pool at the site of the Tony Dapolito building, build out the nearby recreation center at 388 Hudson, preserve the Keith Haring Pool Mural, and provide new and improved public open space along the Clarkson Street corridor.” Berman argues that those who want to tear up the city’s landmarking protections are comparable to the regulation dismantlers of the Trump administration. It’s “a right-wing trickle-down deregulatory approach to government,” he says, when the real problem is increasing wealth inequality throughout the developed world, which has put an upward pressure on home prices. “There’s so much more money than there used to be, but it’s concentrated in the hands of a small number of people who have huge amounts of money to spend on housing,” he said. “And it’s benefiting a much smaller slice of the population.” After we left the rec center, we walked over to 13th Street to look at a new building that Berman calls “the City of Yes Tower.” City of Yes was the signature achievement of the Adams administration, a sweeping set of new regulations that is supposed to build 82,000 new units of housing in the 15 years following its announcement in 2024, and which Berman was one of the loudest (and loneliest) voices against. The 538-foot-tall building is out of scale for a neighborhood of mostly buildings between four and six stories, and will contain just 34 luxury condos, some with their own private entrances and garages. Berman maintains that buildings like these don’t actually lower the cost of housing even as they increase supply. “There’s this somewhat bizarre idea, which is that it could just increase the amount of housing we produce, no matter how expensive it is or how costly it is, it’s going to bring prices down for everybody, which is basically like saying if we built more Maseratis, the price of a Chevy would go down,” he said as he stood beneath yet more scaffolding. “And in fact, in spite of the fact that we have been building much more housing than we’ve had for many years, and the city’s population has actually dropped considerably in the last six years, so the amount of housing we have per person is at its highest levels, probably ever, in the city’s history. But the prices are still skyrocketing because we’re building incredibly expensive housing. We’re destroying the more affordable housing, sometimes to make way for the more expensive housing. So I think there’s a lot of very well-intentioned people who believe we’ve just got to kind of get out of the way and build, build, build, and that’s going to make New York more affordable for everybody. And I don’t think the evidence bears that out.” But Berman’s automotive example could be read another way, says Alex Armlovich, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center: During the pandemic, car production was capped, and automakers used their limited capacity on building luxury cars, like Maseratis. The effects were longer wait times for new, more affordable cars, and higher prices for used cars. What ended up dropping prices was an end to the production caps, which allowed for more new Maseratis and Chevys and more used cars as buyers upgraded and sold their old vehicles. The evidence seems to bear this out; the ten neighborhoods with the highest proportion of historic-district coverage have lost over 1,000 housing units over the past decade, while the parts of those same neighborhoods that are outside of the landmark protections have added nearly 65,000 units. And since the West Village has undergone substantial landmarking over the last half-century — with its first historic district in 1969 and then expansions into the Meatpacking District in 2003 and the Lower West Side in 2006 — it has gone from an affordable neighborhood for immigrants, artists, and writers to some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. “We all agree that the West Village is cute, and we all agree that some of it should be preserved,” said Ben Carlos Thypin, a real-estate broker and one of the founders of Open New York, one of the city’s leading YIMBY groups. “The question is do we want a 19th-century theme park in lower Manhattan, and if we do, how big should it be? And I think a lot of us think that instead of Colonial Williamsburg there should be something that actually centers the humans who live in New York right now.” The “City of Yes Tower,” which is designed by the architects at Kohn Pedersen Fox and is marketed as a future neighborhood landmark, with Art Deco flourishes and sweeping views from river to river, will replace the Waverly Job Center, an unloved and shuttered welfare office. Berman hasn’t argued it was worth saving, but notes the irony of a place where people used to receive federal benefits has been replaced by a luxury tower. “When I started doing this 25 years ago, the thing that the real-estate industry put on us was we’re standing in the way of progress, we’re strangling economic development,” he said. “The city can’t grow with historic preservation. I think that’s been profoundly disproven. Historic districts, landmark buildings, landmark areas are some of the most economically productive in the city. Now they’ve decided to flip the script and say we’re the reason why the city is so expensive.” Can a Rock Club Survive in North Brooklyn? What Will Become of the Ed Sullivan Theater? In Defense of Murray Hill See All The Last NIMBY in a YIMBY Town Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.